Explore the Legacy of Civil Rights Pioneer Mary Ellen Pleasant

Like so many people who journeyed to San Francisco in the 1840s and '50s, civil rights pioneer Mary Ellen Pleasant arrived in the city seeking a better life. However, unlike most travelers who arrived during the Gold Rush, this Black woman succeeded on a grand scale. Raised in abolitionist circles on the island of Nantucket, Mass., Pleasant ascended from domestic laborer to noted entrepreneur during her time in the City by the Bay. Along the way, she amassed a $30-million fortune with her business partner, successfully sued to end racial discrimination on city streetcars, and helped enslaved people escape via the Underground Railroad. 

So why isn’t Mary Ellen Pleasant—considered the mother of California’s civil rights movement—a household name?

One reason may be that Pleasant was a brazen capitalist: She bought real estate, traded gold and silver, and invested in mines. Lynn M. Hudson, whose book The Making of “Mammy Pleasant” is considered a definitive reference on Pleasant’s life, says Pleasant didn’t fit into the easy mold of a selfless Black heroine. Perhaps as a result, Pleasant has been virtually forgotten by many—or worse, dismissed with racist stereotypes. Typically, in history books, “we don’t hear about the civil rights movement in California until we get to the Black Panther Party,” says Hudson, a professor of Black studies and gender at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Tom Weiner, who profiled Pleasant in the book In Defiance: 20 Abolitionists You Were Never Taught in School, echoes that statement. “She [was] a total renaissance woman at a time when it was hard to be a free Black woman. She defies every convention in every imaginable way,” says Weiner. 

Yet it’s undeniable that Pleasant’s quiet local organizing tactics left a blueprint for the wider 1960s civil rights movement. “Mary Ellen Pleasant is a combination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks in one person,” says James Lance Taylor, a University of San Francisco professor focused on politics and race. “Her impact far outlasts her reputation.” 

If you’re interested in exploring Pleasant’s fascinating life and legacy in Northern California, here are five places to visit.

Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial Park, San Francisco

In the late 1870s, Pleasant built a lavish home at the corner of Octavia and Bush streets, at what’s now the edge of San Francisco’s Japantown. The Italianate Victorian mansion, which occupied two city blocks, had 30 rooms, curving paths, and lush gardens. She lived there with business partner Thomas Bell, his wife Teresa, and a handful of Bell children. Local tabloid journalists curious about the unconventional living arrangement started calling the mansion The House of Mystery. After Bell died in 1892, his widow sued for possession of the home. Even though Pleasant’s name was on the deed, Teresa Bell eventually prevailed, and Pleasant was forced to move out in 1899. 

The Green Brothers’ Eye Hospital, designed by architect Frederick Meter, was built there in 1928. Today, the Romanesque Revival edifice is filled with wellness practitioners and is called the Healing Arts Building. The building is not connected to Pleasant, though the caretaker says they admire her legacy. “We honor her and call on her to help protect the building,” says Brooke, who declined to share her last name. 

Pleasant’s memorial site includes a round plaque set in the ground that was dedicated by the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society in 1976.  The most prominent features, however, are the massive blue gum eucalyptus trees, which Pleasant planted. On Feb. 15, 1976, “six huge sidewalk eucalyptus trees were dedicated as the city’s smallest park” according to an item in the San Francisco Chronicle—though in recent years, the City of San Francisco has said it’s not an official city park. The 100-plus-year-old trees, however, have been official “landmark trees” since 1996.

Beltane Ranch, Glen Ellen

Beginning in 1891, Pleasant bought an old ranch and some surrounding hillside properties in the Glen Ellen area of Sonoma County. She named the 1,561-acre property Beltane Ranch, and designed a two-story wood frame home—with small guest rooms, scalloped-edge details, porches, and columns—that still stands today. 

Teresa Bell’s diaries document the improvements made to the ranch: adding peach, plum, and orange trees; planting rose bushes and periwinkle in the garden; and hiring people to take care of dairy cows, the vineyard, and wine cellar. 

Today, Beltane Ranch is a privately owned, six-room luxury inn with wrought-iron bedframes, French doors, vintage sconces, and hearty country breakfasts like the ones Pleasant might have prepared. The Benward family, which has owned the ranch for six generations, also operates a regenerative organic winery and olive farm. Members of the public can book the introductory farm tour, a two-and-a-half-hour experience that includes tastings and history. Take home estate zinfandel and sauvignon blanc, soothing olive oil soap, or blankets made with wool from the Babydoll sheep that tend the vineyard.  

Geneva Cottage site, San Francisco 

Pleasant owned many homes and properties in San Francisco, though most of the original buildings are gone. Her final home in the city was the former Geneva Cottage at the corner of Geneva and San Jose Avenues. This was more rural land in those days, and Pleasant owned two blocks, according to a well-researched account by Amy O’Hair of Sunnyside History. Pleasant launched a laundry business there in 1855, later raising hogs. In 1869, she built a cottage that served as a bucolic refuge for Pleasant, her family, and single women friends and their children. Pleasant moved there in 1899 after leaving her Pacific Heights mansion, according to Hudson’s book. If you squint, you can see Pleasant on the porch in this archival photo. In 1900 she sold the property to A.B. Southard, who developed a streetcar yard and the red-brick Geneva Office Building and Powerhouse. 

Monadnock Building, San Francisco

A Beaux Arts-style office building also designed by Meyer, the Monadnock was built in the Financial District in 1906. When its owners wanted to refresh the space in the ‘80s, they hired mural artists Mark Evans and Charley Brown, known for their decorative work on luxury residential projects. The duo chose a Renaissance theme (since some sources say the building is in Renaissance Revival style) and painted historic San Franciscans, including Pleasant, LGBTQ icon Harvey Milk and dancer/choreographer Isadora Duncan in Renaissance garb, along with dreamy angels and clouds on a peachy sky. The Monadnock lobby is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays. Visit close to happy hour, then slip into The Dawn Club next door for a cold sidecar and some hot jazz. 

African American Museum and Library at Oakland

Pleasant owned several homes in Oakland and made a founding donation worth $10,000 today to help St. Mary’s College of California relocate there. In 2003, painter Daniel Galvez and textile artist Patricia A. Montgomery collaborated on a mural called “A Journey of Promise.” The paint-on-canvas triptych depicts historic Black people including California Supreme Court Justice Allen Broussard, pioneering Oakland educator and Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority leader Dr. Ida Louise Jackson, and Pleasant. It’s installed over the staircase at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, a reference library and cultural institution dedicated to preserving and celebrating Black culture and history through visual art, books, and other works.

Tulocay Cemetery, Napa 

Pleasant spent her final years both in Geneva Cottage and another Pacific Heights home she owned on Webster Street, according to Hudson’s book. While there, she dictated the first half of a memoir that journalist Sam Davis published in Pandex of the Press in 1902. (Davis and Pleasant quarreled and the second half was never printed.) Due to her poor health, friends Olive and Lyman Sherwood, who lived nearby, convinced her to come stay with them in November 1903. She died at their Filbert Street home on Jan. 11, 1904. Pleasant was buried the next day at the Sherwood family plot at Tulocay Cemetery in Napa. She is interred on the northwest side of the cemetery, which dates to 1859. A metal sculpture was added to her grave in 2011, making it one of the most distinct tombs on the grounds.